I would like to know peoples thoughts on this? My personal feeling is that in order for large money DAO proposals to pass there should be a certain percentage voters needed. Historically voter turnout has been very low. Voter apathy reflects lack of community engagement. Under the current system one only needs to have a handful of high token holders to get proposals to pass even with quadratic voting. There is no need to reach out to a larger vote.
I think this is a good idea. More people should be involved in decision making. And regardless of outcomes, getting more people involved is important. I see in the NAP proposal we have incredible participation already. I imagine that the Labs team has done outreach and asked people to vote and get involved, which is healthy!
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Thanks for bringing this up @OregonScott & @Ktando. I agree.
Historical Snapshot participation (58 past proposals):
Summary stats:
- Median turnout: ~27% of circulating supply
- Recent proposals averaging 15-20%
- Multiple $100K+ proposals passed with <15% participation from token holders
From the data, the two recent major proposals highlight low participation:
Cabin Labs Proposal (Oct 2023):
- Total participation: 17,941.01 ₡ABIN (~4.2% of circulating supply)
- Budget: $396,000 USDC + 12,600 ₡ABIN
Technical Needs Proposal (Jan 2024):
- Total participation: 14,447.53 ₡ABIN (~3.4% of circulating supply)
- Budget: $200,000 USDC + 2,400 ₡ABIN
The two largest and most recent proposals allocated significant treasury funds (~$500K) but had under 5% participation from circulating supply holders.
Current NAP proposal (voting ends Nov 27th @ ~5pm PST):
- 19 voters representing ~12K ₡ABIN
- Represents only 2.8% of circulating governance token supply (excluding DAO treasury holding of 573,749 ₡ABIN) as of me writing this on 2024-11-25 at 12:25pm PST
- Many voters appear to be recent NAP participants, likely due to new in-app voting integration and direct motivation to vote from messages to NAP stewards in the closed telegram group chats
- No social/newsletter announcements about the vote being live from Cabin’s social channels, reflecting potentially only targeted outreach to NAP members and internally aligned stakeholders. No a post in the Discord #announcements channel to amplify the opportunity to vote.
- The proposal was edited, and then live for voting the next day. I’d love to see time for review after any final edits are made, along with a call to announce voting is live and field any final chances for discussion, as many topics like DEI were left unaddressed from the prior recorded call on the proposal.
(Median Historical participation = 27% | Recent Avg = 17.5% | NAP proposal as of 2024-11-25 @ 12pm PST = 2.8% of circulating governance token supply)
Next steps?
While the NAP vote shows promising engagement and in-app voting is a great improvement, we’re still far from broad participation across token holders. A formal governance improvement proposal could help standardize outreach and establish appropriate quorum requirements.
Happy to help draft something for review and input that addresses both participation thresholds and communication standards if anyone wants to collab on this as a formal DAO proposal.
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I’m definitely interested in helping draft this proposal.
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Getting more people with context involved with governance is great! I think that’s what we see happening with the current neighborhood accelerator proposal, and what we will continue to see happen if the proposal passes, given it plans to distribute lots of tokens to neighborhood stewards.
In my experience, having a quorum for DAO governance is dangerous, because it often makes it very difficult for proposals to pass and ultimately leads to stagnation, stalemate, and eventually can cause locked funds and/or a dissolution of the DAO. CityDAO is a recent example that comes to mind. As you can see in their Snapshot, the DAO repeatedly failed to achieve quorum on proposals from late 2022 to mid 2024, ultimately causing the DAO to dissolve, despite many passionate contributors trying to pass proposals and make things happen.
Governance changes are always risky and must be approach carefully, because they can create one-way doors that are hard or impossible to get out of. Quorum-based DAO governance is one of the clearest examples of this.
What kinda setup do you have in mind?
From my experience reviewing DAO proposals and tackling DAO governance issues on a couple of spaces I host, several problems kept coming up across 99% of DAOs:
- Lack of participation
- Apathy leading to the above
- Lack of context/understanding
- Lack of motivation (though quite a few downsides to monetary compensation for voting)
- Too much noise and not enough notification customization for holders to even be aware of proposals
- Questionable delegates (you’d be shocked how many never voted even once! and many are whales who got their delegate status based on social media popularity)
- And, yes, low quorums because of the above
I’d love to see us tackling all of the above here at Cabin, though I expect this to take years and - as Jon alluded to - done carefully so as not to put us into a deadlock that leads to dissolution.
So far, I see possible solutions in:
- Grin’s RPG proposal and various explainers of how DAOs, quadratic voting, tokens, etc. works in general and in Cabin (not everybody here is a degen like myself :))
- Implementation of AI agents to help people parse the vast and ever-growing library of forum discussions, Telegram and Discord chats, guides, proposals, and video calls.
- These kinds of discussions raising interest in governance (thank you!)
There’s definitely a lot more to it. At the very least, I think the recent surge in Cabiner activity in here and in our Discord is a step in the right direction. Would love to see it going through the highs and lows of the market cycle.
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Jon and Dahveed, appreciate you both weighing in on this critical governance discussion. 
@Dahveed, the challenges you’ve encountered around participation, apathy, and lack of context in other communities def resonate and I think the solutions you propose are spot on. Excited to jam more on creative incentive structures to drive engagement without the pitfalls of direct monetary rewards. Having a moving-average quorum approach worked well at Kift, but it was a 1-member = 1 vote governance approach, so we’d need to think through how to address Cabin’s quadratic weighting approach.
@jon , I hear you on the risks of quorums and the CityDAO cautionary tale. At the same time, I think we need to be careful not to continue down a path that entrenches the status quo power dynamics.
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The reality that I shared stats for above is that currently a tiny portion of circulating tokens (less than 5%) are making decisions for the entire community. I worry that an approach with no quorum at all will just perpetuate that centralization of control,
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especially since the only people with any significant engagement with new NAP participants seem to be you, @grin & @savkruger, as the NAP group chats are not made accessible to other neighborhood stewards, and their presence is lacking in Discord and on the forum. Other neighborhood stewards have also been banned from the one shared Celebrating Wins groupchat in Telegram when asking questions that the Labs teamed deemed “not appropriate”, I’ve also been banned from posting discussions about DAO proposals in the Farcaster /Cabin channel, effectively censoring interaction between legacy community members and new accelerator participants.
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The Cabin Labs team has also not yet shared that the NAP proposal is up for vote publicly on any social channels, how come?
Anyway…
What if we started with a relatively low quorum (20-30%?) for major decisions that require significant funding (>$30K?) and then experimented our way forward based on actual participation data? We could always adjust as needed, but at least it would start to create some positive pressure towards a more participatory governance culture.
Lots of tricky tradeoffs to balance here, but I hope that if we approach this iteratively and keep a tight feedback loop with the community, we can find a middle path that avoids the extremes of stagnation and entrenched power dynamics. Let’s keep jamming 
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My take on this is that quorum would be a great forcing function to re-involve the majority of Cabin holders and bring the DAO’s incentives back into alignment with its token holders. They are currently out of alignment. But it’s too risky so I don’t see it happening.
I think engagement has fallen off because “Cabin” has become something entirely different than it was when folks got involved and bought or earned tokens. It’s the ship of Theseus, except instead of replacing its old parts with the same ones, it has different parts. In this case, this ship is a different ship, cap’n.
I’d love to see some sort of good faith commitment to re-involve past members and increase voting participation. Contact folks who already hold cabin instead of just distributing more.
Another path could be a rebrand and shift in the governance token that reflects a boundary between the old entity and the new, so us who were involved in the old can let this thing go already.
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I think someone maybe Matai observed that there are a lot of people voting with 100 cabin in this proposal. Great to see increased participation. Is the assumption correct that some portion of these are people in the NAP who were given Cabin tokens?
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